How To Make a Large Website Easy to Maintain?

[radderfire]

Hi Guys

What technique do you use to make a large website easy to maintain? At the moment I am just using .php includes, but this has big limitations. I guess I should be using a CMS. Would you say Wordpress was a good choice for a large website? I need to set unique meta tags and preferably have descriptive urls.

Thanks

 

[radderfire]

I suppose it depends on what the website is for and what you mean by large?

A site showcasing products with 400+ pages.

 

[radderfire]

Assuming the majority of those "pages" are each of the individual products, I would probably look at streamlining it using some kind of templating solution (or even an MVC-type structure depending on the complexity of the site). So yes, some kind of organised content management.

It's a shopping site. Each page related to a type of product, e.g. the microwave oven. Yes, I need a better templating system than the one I have currently. At the moment, I just have a template file which contains php includes for the header and footer and various other bits of the page. So, when I need to update fundamental site structure, I would need to resave 400+ pages, which I don't want to do.

So, yes, I need a better template system, where I have individual content on the page, but it's easy to change the fundamental page structure, e.g. header or layout of divs etc etc. So I need page content into a database, and then a templating system.

I'm guessing Wordpress is a good candidate to do this, and I'm just wondering what else is out there to consider.

Rgds